The Schwartz Report

Rackspace Extends Protection to Hyper-V and PCI for Azure

Rackspace will secure Hyper-V workloads via its managed security service offering and has announced its Microsoft Azure offering is now PCI certified. The company, one of the world's largest managed services provider, is talking up the new Hyper-V protection capabilities at this week's Microsoft Ignite conference, taking place in Orlando, Fla.

The Hyper-V protection extends across the company's Rackspace Managed Security (RMS) service. Also, a new Rackspace Cloud Replication for Hyper-V will be offered under the umbrella of its Rackspace portfolio of Microsoft services, which provides overall threat protection using analytics and remediation across the company's managed services offering. The managed Rackspace Cloud Replication for Hyper-V offering is based on Microsoft's Azure Site Recovery and offers replication, storage and failover of Hyper-V virtual machines.

While Rackspace said the new offering lets organizations use the managed service to target Microsoft Azure rather than on-premises infrastructure, it also provides an alternative to moving those Hyper-V workloads into an infrastructure-as-a-service scenario, said Jeff DeVerter, CTO of Microsoft technologies at Rackspace, during an interview at Ignite.

"As excited as the world is about the cloud, not every workload is ready to be made into a modern application, and so customers can actually have a single tenant using Hyper-V and solve the problem of getting out of the datacenter, which most companies want to do today," DeVerter said. "But they don't have to take on the added expense of running an IaaS inside of Azure, and IaaS workload tends to cost more in azure than it does in a tenant."

DeVerter said running them in Hyper-V solves the problem of moving those workloads out of on-premises datacenters. Rackspace can work with customers over time and starting to extend those application out into Azure, if transforming the application is the ultimate goal. Rackspace had already offered protection of workloads for VMware-based VMs.

Rackspace also used Ignite to announce that its managed Microsoft Azure service is now has PCI certified for those running workloads that carry payment data. Microsoft Azure is already PCI compliant. But because Rackspace manages the workloads, it too had to secure the certification.